VICTIMIZED TEACHERS’ EXPERIENCES ABOUT TEACHER-TARGETED BULLYING BY STUDENTS

"The aim of this study was to gain insights into the bullying of teachers by their learners from the perspective of victims of teacher-targeted bullying by learners. This study followed a qualitative and descriptive research design stemming from semi-structured personal interviews with victims of teacher-targeted bullying. A thematic content analysis of the data generated from semi-structured personal interviews with six victimized teachers as a snowball sampling. The sample consisted of male (n=2) and female (n=4) participants from rural (n=3) and urban (n=3) school locations in Estonia. The focus of this study was to determine how the teachers who have experienced bullying by their students describe the nature, influence and reasons attributed to such bullying. The findings indicate that the victims of teacher-targeted bullying by students were exposed repeatedly over long time verbal bullying, ignoring the teacher and other threats and cyber-attacks directed against teachers, whereby line between learners’ misbehavior at classroom and bullying behavior was recognized viewing bullying as group-based phenomenon. Bullying against teachers by pupils had a negative influence on the victims’ teaching and learning, as well as their private lives; and victims perceived the lack of support from educational authorities."